This is a nice idea. Some possibilities:

-Pre/suffix are only revealed by greater ID. Or at least regular ID, but greater might be better.
-Pre/suffix could be revealed by application of a skill (metallurgy? appraising?)

I myself have found the fact that these affixes are revealed upon equipping somewhat disappointing from my first few games already. Although I obviously had no clue what exactly each one meant back then, I could more or less guess whether they were good or bad from the word used. Although I must admit I used to think 'surrendering' would make my opponents panic more frequently. Maybe another solution is to make some of the words even more difficult to guess what they do.

I'm thus all for the suggestion that merely equipping them should not ID the affix.

I'll even extend that suggestion even a bit further by saying that I don't even think the to-hit and damage should be IDed until the equipment is used. So for armour, you will only learn the attributes once you get hit enough times to be certain of what they are, similar to monster memory learning information about a certain monster.
For a weapon the to-hit and damage also has to be learned through use. This of course mean that a character with a low learning score might never know what his equipment actually is, until IDed with a scroll. The player will still have a rough idea though. :)

Maybe I'm pushing this somewhat. :P

Not revealing stats of weapons / armor until they're used a bit is very reminiscent of Crawl and I particularly hated that feature.

I'm fine with hiding affixes though...it would be cool to make them reveal over time if you've ID'd it and have Appraising...making a fairly useless skill somewhat worthwhile.

I like the general idea of not hiding affixes, but I think it would only be good if affixes are made way more frequent. With their current frequency, I think most of the time the effect would be that we would never find affixed weapons, because we would silently discard them without even trying the weapon. There's no way in hell I'm going to actually try 50 spears (not try as in wield and unwield, but actually taking the time to kill stuff with them) to see if one of them is of lightning, vampiric or something like that.

An intermediate solution is what some games like Brogue or Pixel Dungeon do: they tell you that the weapon has some special property (called runes in Brogue and enchantments in Pixel Dungeon IIRC), but they don't tell you what it is until you have ID'd it. So we could see things like "an enchanted mace (+1, 1d6)", hinting the player that they might want to keep that mace because it's somewhat special, and then actually IDing it would reveal whether it's of fire, brutal or whatever.

Optional twist: you need Pe (or Metallurgy/Appraising could help) to tell enchanted from non-enchanted weapons.

If this change goes in I do not think it should require greater ID. Those are too rare to spend on everything I find hoping it's a decent affix. (Or make greater ID more common)
I also second Al-Khwarizmi's suggestion that you be able to tell that it *has* an affix.
Appraising or some other skill could slowly identify those affixes, and could using it (every swing of a weapon has a 0.5% chance to ID it, or something). I'll know which ones to try because I'll know they've got an affix.

I'm sorry, you can't tell the player that an item has an affix. IMO. Everyone will then mostly only pick up the affixed stuff and leave everything else on the floor and they will know which body armour are fairly safe to equip even without knowing its B/U/C. Etc. etc. etc.

What if you revealed the presence of the affix only after equip? The way you currently do, but instead of saying what the affix is, you find out that it HAS an affix. But you only find that after you equip it.

So you see: (spear: 50s). Then you equip it and it either just looks like a spear, or it says "enchanted spear". After using it for a while/ID'ing it you find out what it ACTUALLY is.

I like this the way it is right now. Prefixes and suffixes are sufficiently rare that I don't see an issue here.
They are mostly physical properties of items, so similarly to how you discover that a weapon has 1d8+3 damage dice simply by equipping it, you also discover that it has 5d8+3 damage dice the same way - by equipping.
Hence, you immediately recognize it as *foo* of devastation. I don't see a problem here.
Same is true for the vast majority of other affixes, especially those that affect damage.
What you are requesting is to make equip-IDing stuff more dangerous and less effective and I will never agree with that.
Hence I voted against this.

I would still like to see the bad affixes come into play sometimes-maybe Thomas can make them auto-cursing at least?

> What if you revealed the presence of the affix only after equip? The way you currently do, but instead of saying what the affix is, you find out that it HAS an affix. But you only find that after you equip it.
>
>So you see: (spear: 50s). Then you equip it and it either just looks like a spear, or it says "enchanted spear". After using it for a while/ID'ing it you find out what it ACTUALLY is.

Sounds okay, although I like the suggestions where Appraising rather plays a role in letting you know whether an item is affixed.

Yes, that would give the Appraising skill a much-needed boost.